It’s a slow month for music piracy. That’s the trouble with ignoring release dates- you never know when the things you look forward to might show up. Y’all motherfuckers who still buy CDs can anticipate the new Hold Steady album, can get off on the manic pop thrill of arm’s way by Islands. Those of us on the post-Oink private trackers heard that shit ages ago, and now we’re fiending for something new- when is Nas’ record gonna leak? What about Anthony Hamilton or Okkervil River? I’ve already used up all those other songs.
But who cares about that? Oh, the tragic laments of an mp3 downloader who’s right in the middle of generations- until I was twenty years old, piracy was a novelty, a way to download, like, random Cure b-sides that Gabe and I were desperate to find. Trying to actually download an entire album was counter-productive; who wanted to leave their computer humming for three days to slowly acquire a Kid Rock CD? I had a zillion CDs, now I have none, and being an in-betweener, I sometimes lament the fact that I can’t anticipate the release of something I’m looking forward to. People even four or five years younger than me have no such problem; they stopped having to buy CDs when Audiogalaxy started when they were sixteen, and that’s all the story there is. It’s so hard to be me, you know.
Oh, fuck- I started writing this when it was still light out, which really just means sometime before ten-thirty, and now it is half-midnight, as the English say, and I had forgotten about it entirely. This is the Dan of two worlds, then, rambling at you from the past and the future. Or the present. Oh, lord, this is disjointed. Do you know how long it’s been since I slept more than five broken hours in a single night? And I am never sleepy. I don’t know if that’s healthy or not. It seems like it should be. Who cares how much sleep you get so long as you’re not passing out on the train, right? But- lord, I do not make any sense at all anymore.
I was going to write about how they’ve, like, cured cancer, but what do you think that’ll come out as? dude, cancer’s totally cured!… yeesh. A thousand words a day, that is sometimes a thousand words of rambling silliness, sometimes something useful that I can be proud of. Right now, guess what we’re on about?
I coughed out about 400 words earlier- including, to my great happiness, a first half of a query letter for the novel that I think actually captures the tone and essence of the book, while still getting on with the plot of the thing. I still don’t have a second half to the letter, but the first 150 words are good, and that is kind of a new thing right now. Although I just received another request for the manuscript today, in response to a letter I sent out a month ago, so who can tell what people will respond to? This agency would be an exciting one to work with, but I am not banking on anything just yet… Regardless, though, it is nice to be moving forward on this after nearly a month of biding my time, waiting to see what I can do to build my credits in a hurry before sending out more letters that might not even be a reasonable representation of the book. But who can tell? Right now, I’m just sending shit out.
The other 250 words were the beginning of a piece for consideration to nerve.com- do you remember Nerve? We all loved it once, do not lie. You had a personal ad there.
Hey, did I ever tell you how Kat and I didn’t meet on Nerve? That’s a good story, that’ll clear the rest of my words for the day without breaking a sweat. It is a true story. We had both recently arrived in Austin and we both had ads on Nerve, except mine was actually on The Onion’s personal ads, which is just Nerve syndicated. She sent me a- whatever they call it on that site when you try to contact someone when you haven’t paid for the service, and I didn’t respond because I had not paid for it, either. That was the extent of our interaction on the Internet. At some point when we worked together at the book store, we both figured out that she had sent me the thing on Nerve, but neither of us said it because, you know, it was kind of embarrassing and we were pretending that we were just friends anyway.
It’s fortunate that we didn’t meet on the Internet. During the heyday of Friendster, back in 1869, I went on many Internet dates and they were all terrible (unless I am forgetting one that I went on with you, in which case it was really nice and I regret to this day that it didn’t work out) and that is why I didn’t ever go on MySpace dates or anything like that, because it took me about six weeks to realize that I was very bad at online dating. Eventually I just found this girl I was really good friends with and married her. Easy!
Okay, cleared the bar again with rambling semi-coherence. Lord, that was an unromantic re-telling of the story of our relationship, wasn’t it? But I have offered enough pretty versions of it, and she will forgive me. Some day.
